Oh! Christmas Tree

All over the world people are rushing around searching for the perfect tree to put up in their house or enter their dark, cobweb-filled lofts trying to remember where they put it. Long strings of lights are being untangled and many a rude word is being said as ‘dead’ light-bulbs are tracked down and twisted to see if they will work.

But why do we go through this madness every year? In this article we look at the story behind this very traditional Christmas custom...

As with most of the Christmas traditions the origins of the Christmas Tree can be found in the dark and distant past, in the pagan days before Christianity. The Yule Log was originally a huge piece of wood brought into the great halls for the celebration of Yule, the heat and light it produced kept the villagers safe and warm for the duration of the festival. Today the Yule Log is represented as a very unhealthy chocolate dessert eaten at Christmas.

It was not until the 16th century that the use of living trees first recorded example was in Northern Germany, though there are also claims that this first happened in Latvia, and Estonia. Large trees were displayed outside Guildhalls where they were decorated with bags of nuts, apples, dates, pretzels and paper flowers.

By the 18th century the people of the Rhineland decided to go one step further and, ignoring all the Health and Safety regulations, they brought their trees into the house and decorated them with candles. The Catholic Church, not happy about losing its control over how people celebrate, was not amused with this custom and refused to recognise it until eventually trees became so popular throughout the country that the Church was unable to stop people enjoying themselves.

By the 19th century the Russian royal family had copied the idea and the word spread through all the best dinner-parties and social gatherings. Very soon the tradition had spread to the finest houses of Austria and France. It was at this time that the Christmas Tree crossed The Channel and came to Britain with ‘mad’ King George III and his Hanoverian family, but the ‘common’ people were unaware of the tradition until the time of Queen Victoria when a picture of the British Royal family was published in the Illustrated London News. Suddenly everyone wanted to be like the Queen and have a Christmas Tree in their house.

At first the trees were decorated with home-made ornaments, nuts and fruit. In the 1880s German glassmakers began to produce glass ornaments for Christmas trees, and they quickly became popular in the towns that surrounded the factories. It was Frank Woolworth’s department stores which made glass ornaments mass-market by the 1890s, and Woolworths stores continued to sell cheap and cheerful decorations right up until last year.

With the invention of the electric light-bulb the annual Christmas fire-threat was reduced as candles were replaced with lights, though this has lead to an increase in Christmas frustration and bad moods as the expectation and excitement is ruined when the lights are turned on...and nothing happens.
Christmas is a time for giving, and every year the Christmas tree in Trafalgar square in London is given to London by the city of Oslo in Norway, in thanks for help we gave them in the 1940s. But most Christmas trees are bought by each family to decorate at home and place presents underneath. That needs a lot of trees – 50,000 grow just outside Torbay at the Marldon Christmas Tree farm ready to be cut down for Christmas. AT